A micro-optic beam deflection system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,444,572 A. Here, the "sight direction" is altered by lateral displacement of the lens grids. In this arrangement, the pair of lens grids are positioned in an aperture plane of an imaging path of rays. Parallel light beams are incident on the lens grids. Each object point simultaneously illuminates many lenses of the lens grid. Because the lenses of the lens grid are periodically arranged, modulation of the wavefronts is effected. Grating orders occur. This causes considerable chromatic errors. Therefore, this arrangement does not fulfil the requirements demanded from a high-resolution system.
Furthermore, mirror arrays are known consisting of a multitude of micro-mechanically produced, tiltable mirror elements, which are digitally controllable by electric control signals. By tilting the mirrors, rays incident on the mirror array can be guided either to enter a detection channel of a detector array or to by-pass it. U.S. Pat. No. 5,519,206 describes an arrangement in which an intermediate image of an object scene is generated in the plane of the mirror array by a wide angle objective. The pixel number of the mirror array is considerably larger than the pixel number of the detector array, i.e. a two-dimensional arrangement of detector elements. Therefore, a plurality of pixels or mirror elements of the mirror array are imaged on each detector element of the detector array by means of a second imaging objective. Now, if only one of the mirror elements of each sub-matrix is switched to a position in which it directs an incident light beam onto the second imaging objective while all the other detector elements of the sub-matrices direct their light beams to by-pass the second imaging objective, then a full image with higher resolution can be obtained by successively switching the mirror elements and storing the images after a cycle.
Such a mirror arrangement requires a folding of the path of rays. Each individual mirror element is controlled. Therefore such mirror arrays are quite expensive.